State police overreach in Sutton

I am an unapologetic union supporter. I have no problem with a union working fiercely to ensure decent wages, good benefits and safe working environments for its members.

Yet what the State Police Association of Massachusetts is doing to Sutton and that town's police officers is a disgrace to labor practices and a threat to community-accountable law enforcement.

Piqued that Sutton police officers were elbowing in on the boatload of money that can be reaped in police details from upcoming construction along the state roadway that runs through the town, SPAM recently erected a billboard off Route 146 warning Sutton residents essentially not to trust their local police force.

"Troopers are your best protection," the billboard reads.

Many local police chiefs are understandably alarmed at this blatant attack on their legitimacy.

"We depend on each other for backup every single day," Wayne Sampson, executive director of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association and a former Shrewsbury police chief, said in explaining the traditional close working relationship between local and state police officers.

"There is no difference in the color of the uniform," Mr. Sampson told me Tuesday.

"Throughout the commonwealth, the local community and state police pretty much have a gentlemen's agreement on who covers what, but our first mission is to protect the public."

But if that is the case, something has gone awfully awry.

SPAM's president, Trooper Dana Pullman, whom I unsuccessfully tried to contact Tuesday through his organization's public relations firm, explained in a previous statement that the billboard was a means to "reassure the citizens of Sutton" that he and his colleagues "stand ready to assist in any way we can."

He means you'd better get a tighter grip on your wallet, because this billboard is strictly a naked and unconscionable money grab.

Indeed, Trooper Pullman appears to be the poster child for abuse of paid police details.

According to an internal affairs investigation mentioned in a Sunday Telegram article, the SPAM president was charged with overlapping regular work hours with detail hours, logging paid details in excess of 16½ hours in a 24-hour period, and failing to properly report his details.

We don't know if he was disciplined for the "sustained" transgressions, as such information is confined to personnel records, but that he still heads the union says something about the organization.

The obnoxious billboard is just one of several ways in which Sutton police officers have been bullied and intimidated by SPAM, which apparently must think that the town's legally raised and duty-sworn police force is either unnecessary or un-American.

Some time ago, state troopers, claiming jurisdictional rights, bullied Sutton police officers who had responded to an accident near the Central Turnpike exit off of Route 146. A Sutton police lieutenant at the scene reported that one of the state troopers initiated "intentional and purposeful" contact by banging into him.

If that had been a regular citizen doing the banging, he or she would have been hauled in front of a judge on charges of assault and battery on a police officer.

This is not earth-shaking news, of course.

Many of us know the law is not always applied impartially. Still, the question of who is policing the state troopers is an important one to ask, because increasingly it would appear that SPAM is the final arbiter of state police conduct, and that cannot be good for Massachusetts residents.